My First Ever Tutorial on Making Gifs for Tumblr

It’s not that I get asked a lot about this, but I just wanted to help out since I’m not really that busy. lol

The thing is, if you really want to learn the hooks on photoshop, a little exploration and creativity will definitely do you well. You can try googling for tutorials and stuff (on coloring and all those things). Livejournal has a wide range of coloring tips and basically general tutorials on photoshop.

But here it goes.

One of the first photoshop-related query I got was how to put two gifs in one canvas like this:

So first off, import your first clip. In my case it’s the LaChaTa ending pose.

File>Import>Video frames to Layers… and it will ask you for your clip. Now what I do, instead of importing the entire video to Photoshop, I trim the specific clip I want form the entire video using Virtual Dub first.

STEP 1:

Okay, so when this appears, the most important thing to do is trim the clip further depending on how you would want it to appear. What I do is, I make sure it will still come off looking fairly okay within a 10frame limit since Tumblr is very strict with their gifs.

Choose Selected Range Only and trim away. I usually limit it to at least 4 frames. The darker gray area shows the specific scene I trimmed this clip further to.

STEP 2:

So now I came up with 9 FRAMES. You have to know the difference between layers and frames. 

I resize the image first to 500x281 (photoshop will automatically provide the proportionate height so no need to worry on that part as long as the width is at most 500px)

After resizing the image, I then resize the Canvas size to 500x562. 562 because the original image height was 281 and since I will be putting another gif on the same canvas, I just adjust the height to a size that will accomodate the second gif. phew.

STEP 3:

Repeat step 1 only with the second clip. Make sure to get the same number of frames as with your first clip. Repeat step 2 with the image resizing. You can disregard resizing the canvas.

Step 4:

This is when we merge the two gifs. Basically, you just select all the layers of the second gif and drag them to the first canvas. That automatically populates the 9 frames with the first layer of the gif that you dragged over.

Important note: when moving the gif around a canvas make sure you have all the layers and frames selected.

STEP 5:

Okay this part I think is really tricky to some. Once you have both gifs on one canvas, the way to make them both move at the same time is through the visibility eye thing on the left side of the layer. It’s that small square thingy you have on every layer. (I apologize for the lack of a better and proper term)

The gif on top is already set, so you just need to make the bottom one move, and since layer 1 is automatically populated on all 9 frames, start with frame 2 and click on the eye thing on it’s respective layer. on this one it’s layer 11.

So basically,

frame 2 = layer 11
frame 3 = layer 12
frame 4 = layer 13…

you get it, right? :)

STEP 6:

So here’s the final step. Since the gif I made exceeded the tumblr limit (it ended up around 1mb in size), decreasing it’s dimension would also decrease its size. and since I’m really picky with gifs and I want one with 500 in width, I resize the image again to 350, and then resize the canvas to 500x500.

I use a filmstrip texture (which you can download from the net - I no longer have the link sorry so here I say try googling :D)

there you have it, folks :D